Many non-profits for charity or standards bodies struggled to make it through the COVID crises. Members/donors pulled spending back for 3 to 4 years, only now in 2024 are there indications of putting back funding in 2025 budgets. OpenTravel has struggled since late 2020 but enough members continued their support to make it through the crises. Funding levels were low but despite the challenge, DEx and message updates continued. A dozen or more code lists updates were published while work on XML and 2.0 model (JSON) updates continued. There will be a new release of XML message soon and an OTA 2.0 release later this year. DEx security was enhanced and set up a virtual desktop environment. This virtual desktop provides a ready to use sandbox for working with the 2.0 model, producing and testing resulting JSON APIs.
The OpenTravel website has been extremely busy. During this “down” period thousands of message/model downloads supporting hundreds of projects at hundreds of companies across 18 countries. This has provided high value to the travel industry.
However, this can not continue at current funding levels, nor can new efforts be initiated to address the needs of the industry to move to JSON/REST and offer/order paradigms. In response to this need a group of travel industry leaders met on September 12th, 2024 to reboot OpenTravel.
The reboot will evaluate the needs of the travel industry to support digital retail via a more consistent approach to APIs. Companies using OpenTravel messages as a starting point for their JSON based API enhancements still leaves too many needless differences in API structure and behavior. We need more consistency between travel suppliers and consumers to work effectively with each other. The scope includes defining the capabilities and behaviors of offer and order approaches using well known, successful, open-source patterns. Once an approach to bring consistency to APIs and hence lower costs is defined, membership and funding models will be proposed. This may include becoming part of a larger open-source community.
The current work mentioned above on code lists, new XML and 2.0 releases will continue. Volunteers are working on how to make DEx and GitHub cooperate to better support workgroups. There are three or more new workgroups starting up. However, funding is still very tight so if you are a current member, please consider acting on your 2024 invoice. If you are not a member please consider joining and/or using the donation capability on the OpenTravel homepage. This includes those just downloading the messages such as channels and startups. Like using Wiki websites, servers and websites don’t run themselves, please contribute.
OpenTravel has published an invitation to help form a new workgroup to look at the standardization of offer/order capabilities and behaviors. Please consider how you can support such a high value effort while we reboot OpenTravel. You can sign up for the workgroup here.